CS2 Rush Hour update: Rush mode, Premier map picks and clan tags

Valve has just released Rush Hour, a big Counter-Strike 2 update. It brings a new game mode, a new way to choose maps in Premier, clearer blood and bullet impacts, a rebuilt crosshair menu and the return of clan tags. Here is everything that changes, with the pictures and videos from the announcement.

Rush, a new 3v3 mode

Rush is a queued mode for teams of three, made of short and intense rounds. Each team has a castle at one end of a chain of battle arenas. Win a round and the fight moves toward the enemy castle, lose it and you are pushed back toward yours. Take the enemy castle to win the match.

A round is won at the tower: once the other team is eliminated, or when time runs out, take control of it. Money is tight and time is short, so every purchase and every second counts.

The arenas are drawn at random for every match, so no two games take the same path. A friends leaderboard keeps count of your Rush wins against your Steam friends.

A first patch followed the next day. Once a team is wiped out, the countdown now lasts up to 14 seconds instead of 7 in the end rooms and on Convoy, and it no longer starts when a team dies to suicides, team kills or disconnects. Warmup, freeze time and technical timeouts are shorter too.

Premier: picks instead of bans

Premier no longer bans maps down to the last one standing. The teams now pick them: the first team picks one map, the second picks two, then the first picks the last one. One of the four is then drawn at random and the match starts. The idea is simple: if you have spent hours learning a map, you get a real chance to play it.

Clearer blood and bullet impacts

Blood is much easier to see and bullet impacts leave sharper, more detailed marks. You can tell at a glance where your spray lands and whether you hit someone.

A rebuilt crosshair menu

Crosshairs now have their own Crosshair/Scopes tab in the settings, with a live preview and new styles: static square and circle, dot only, and several dynamic crosshairs. The new default, Dynamic Quad, spreads out to show how accurate your weapon really is.

Sizes are now set in pixels: a thickness of 1, a length of 8 and a gap of 4 draw exactly that on your screen, and if you change resolution the crosshair rescales to keep the same proportions. A half-outline option draws only the top-left part of the outline. If your crosshair looks different after the update, the new tab is the place to fix it.

Clan tags are back

Choose one of your Steam groups in your player profile and its tag shows next to your name, and in the kill feed since the first patch. Join the CSEKIP Steam group and pick it to wear the CSEKIP tag in game.

What you won't hear

• Silent reload: hold the reload key to reload without a sound. It takes noticeably longer, so choose your moment.
• Silent unscope: leaving the scope of a sniper rifle no longer makes any noise.

Starjunk 95 music kit

Starjunk 95's Industrial Sunset Memories joins the music kits, in standard and StatTrak versions in the Store tab. You can also set the music volume for each game mode now.

Everything else

• Stickers can now be applied to the C4.
• Chickens now take damage from the Zeus x27.
• The halftime scoreboard now fully counts the last round before the switch.
• A way to dodge a kick ban has been closed.
• Holes, gaps and clipping fixed on Ancient, Cache, Mirage and Train.
• The game moves to the latest version of Source 2.

For map makers

The Workshop gets new entities. minimap_volume shows a custom minimap while a player is inside an area, sky_camera_volume draws a different skybox depending on where you stand, point_deathcam_bounds keeps the death camera within set limits and env_shake_volume confines camera shake to an area. On the server side, ammo_grenade_limit_total now also caps how many grenades a player can buy in a round.

On the CSEKIP servers

Our servers run community plugins on top of CS2, and a big update sometimes means patching them too. If a server is offline for a moment, the Servers page shows it and the news goes out on our Discord.

The full announcement is on Steam and counter-strike.net.

Pictures and videos: Valve.